Gaming Tools

Browser Enhancement Tools

Firefox

I highly recommend using this browser. It doesn’t come with a lot of bells and whistles, But that’s kind of the whole point. The idea is you add the features you want via “addons”. Pretty much any feature you can think of, it’s probably out there in one form or another. What follows are some of my favorite addons for this browser. Some have direct gaming applications, while others I’ve found simply make my browsing expereince more enjoyable.

For those who are running multiple accounts to play games this is an invaluable tool. This allows you to setup multiple profiles for your Firefox browser. More then that each profile is treated as a completely separate entity in terms of bookmarks, cookies, etc.What this means is that you can run multiple instances of the same browser game side by side. You can even have the relevant passwords for each account saved to the profile.

This gives you a page in Firefox (which can be set as your default “homepage” that provides you with a graphical bookmark manager, giving you quick access to the websites you use the most. This is a feature stolen from Opera, which was my browser of choice before bing convinced to use Firefox.

Ever had a browser crash on you? Session page allows you to recover from a crashed session in whatever way is most useful to you. It periodically keeps track of what tabs you had open. This means you can close the browser down without having to worry about losing the urls of all the pages you had open. If one of them caused the crash, you can instead bring up a list of what was open allowing you to re-open exactly what you want and ignore the rest.

This is a pretty simple addon which adds so much convenience to your browser you’ll forget that it isn’t a normal feature of Firefox. It adds 2 buttons to your tab bar, “add new tab” and “undo tab close”. That’s right, now when you misclick and close the wrong tab, you can immediately correct the error, without having to hunt back through your history or bookmarks to figure out what it was you just accidentally closed.

This addon is one of the main reasons I switched permantely to firefox. It adds some buttons to your url bar that allows you to quickly and easily navigate though websites with predicatable url sequences. This is great for forums and photo galleries as it allows you to bypass the normal site navigation.This is a pretty specific tool and so unless you frequent websites that use numerical sequences in their urls on a regular basis. You probably won’t get much use out of it. However, I found it to be a godsend as I was really close to writing a program that does exactly what this addon does.

This little program allows you to emulate direct x in such a way that programs that use direct x will appear in a window rather then taking up the entire screen. This provides a gaming solution to games that you would otherwise be unable to play in a windowed mode.

This website specializes in old games. Really, really old games. Basically games that are so old that thier licences are no longer being enforced by the companies who produced the games. You can find all of your old Classics here. The trick of course is getting them to run on your machine (see the
emulation section)

A sister site to the above Abandonia. This site also does free games, but instead of old games whose licenses are no longer being enforced. This site provides downloads for freeware games. The games found here (so far as I can tell) are all full versions of the games, rather then just being a place for demos and shareware copies. Alot of the games here tend to not be final releases, but that just means you have a chance to interact with the developers letting them know what you like and don’t like.

Don’t let the pink fool you. Many of the games found here can be quite enjoyable for boys and girls alike. What I particularly like about this site is the multi-player section. Here you can play games head to head with your friends. Unlike most sites though you don’t have to actually join the site or sign up for anything to do this. Both of you just load up the game, figure out who you are (un-registered users get numbers for names) and then start playing.

I’m sure most of you are already aware of this site, but I’m listing it for completeness. Everything here is done in flash, but no matter what your tastes are you’re bound to find movies and games to suit it. I’ll admit the games tend to be rather rudimentary since it’s all flash. But even so it’s fairly easy to find something good to kill a couple of hours.

Again, I think everyone already knows about this one but it’s here anyway. Facebook also has games that can be found under the “apps” section. In fact many of the games on Myspace are also on Facebook. Each site does however have a few games that are unique to the site.

Yahoo has a games section which has been steadily growing over the years. The only downside is that only about half the single player games are truly “free”. Most of them are demos or completely unplayable without paying money. Certainly not one of my first choices but it does have a pretty good verity of games that can easily amuse for an hour or so.